Red Hat announced an upgrade of its Enterprise Linux that offers increased scalability, performance and management of its KVM virtualization as well as performance kicks for Xen. RHEL 5.8, along with the beta of a new Subscription Asset Manager (SAM) tool, were made available on Feb. 21.

RHEL 6 offers greatly enhanced scalability and is well equipped to handle future technological advances. The switch to KVM virtualisation and server subscription tweaks may not be universally popular, but existing Red Hat customers and new Linux converts should still consider it.

Novell's first service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 delivers a host of significant new virtualization and high availability features and support options.First, SP1 offers the latest Xen hypervisor, Xen 4.

When I heard last week that Microsoft and Red Hat would cooperate on Xen virtualization, I knew the Linux leader's long awaited KVM strategy would be right around the corner.It's no secret that Red Hat has chosen KVM in the Linux kernel over Xen as its long term virtualization engine.

Early releases of the Xen hypervisor showed promise but had lots of rough edges. Citrix's XenServer 5, however, is very much a production-class virtualisation solution with features that match, and in some cases exceed, what's available on rival platforms.

VMware is the clear market leader in providing virtualization technology with 82% of the sample using VMware. Despite high levels of Linux use, only 3% of the sample were using Xen as their virtualization platform. Microsoft was used by 13% of the sample base with various Unix technologies and mainframe accounting for 14%. 59% of [...]

Red Hat has significantly sped up the performance of Windows and Linux guests running on its Xen-based Red Hat Enterprise 5 platform.The Raleigh, NC software company released on May 20 paravirtualized drivers that significantly improve the performance of older Red Hat Enterprise 3 and 4 workloads on its current Linux platform.